Know your audience
This is the most important part of any digital marketing strategy. Before you can sell anything, you need to know who your customers are so you can speak their language, meet their expectations, and be present in the places they frequent. So do your research, and create a profile for each of your target audiences.
Map your goal funnels
So now you know who your customer is, and where you will find them. Now you need to map out the journey you will take those customers on to convert for each of your goals. That might be to sign-up for your email list, follow you on social media, buy your product, refer your product to others, etc. How will you get them in, and then convince them to take action? How will you keep customers coming back? Some people won’t convert straight away, so how will you stay in touch to warm them up to a conversion in the future?
You waste your money trying to market steak to an audience of vegetarians!
Photo by Emerson Vieira on Unsplash
Search Engine Optimisation
If you want to be seen by people searching for your product or service, you need to be in the first few pages of search results. Make sure you regularly use online tools like SEMRush to analyse your website and make constant improvements. The key to good ranking is to know what keywords and phrases you want to rank highly with, and then make sure your website pages feature those keywords and phrases prominently (i.e. Title tags, Headings, and body text). A great way to have fresh, keyword rich content on your website is to start a blog. You will then also have content to share on social media and to your email list!
Search Engine Marketing
Even if you optimise your site to rank #1 on Google (nice work!), your competitors will still be appearing above you because they are paying for prominence. If you don’t want to miss out on targeted search traffic, you need to be using AdWords. However, you can easily waste your budget if you don’t know the traps. Don’t waste your money on keywords with a lot of competition. Focus instead on specific phrases that are unique to your website/business. If you run these types of ads, and point them at custom-made landing pages that are rich in the keywords/phrases used in your ad then you will pay less, and get more traffic that is more likely to convert!
Social Media Engagement
Your social media engagement strategy will depend on the size of your organisation, how much time you can commit to social media engagement, and whether your customers are local, nation-wide, or global. You will need to find out which social media platforms your customers are on, to focus your efforts on the right channels. At the very least, you MUST be responsive to customer feedback and questions. Ideally you will have regular blog articles to promote, special deals that only customers that follow you on social media receive, and you regularly are listening to what people are saying about your organisation online.
Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash
Social Media Marketing
With organic reach shrinking on the major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it’s never been more important to take a strategic approach to paid social media marketing. If you are to spend your budget wisely, it is prudent to create a framework for who you are targeting, what you want them to do, what success looks like, and test your messages on a small scale every time with different creative before letting the results determine where you spend your budget. Keep in mind that your audience won’t be on a particular platform for the rest of time, so don’t fall into the trap of getting too wedded to a platform. It’s important to future-proof your investment by not just getting ‘fans’ or ‘followers’ but also converting them into leads by getting their email / phone number so when they inevitably change social media platforms you won’t lose contact with them.
Banner Advertising
Banner advertising has never been more important, particularly with the advent of remarketing, in raising brand awareness and bringing lukewarm potential customers or clients back to your website. Affiliate networks and Facebook Pixel are remarkable tools for reaching new audiences and bringing in new customers. Eye-catching creativity and brand consistency is important in a context where web users are increasingly becoming ‘banner-blind’.
Email (Direct) Marketing
By far the most valuable asset you can acquire from a website user is their email address. This allows you to build an ongoing relationship with them, make them feel special by offering deals the general public can’t access, and also warm up leads that haven’t converted yet.
The most profitable business is repeat business, and there’s nothing more effective at generating repeat business than direct email marketing. So start building your mailing list(s)!
